10 Film Director's Cuts That Actually Made The Movie Shorter

Shorter by: 7 minutes

Peter Weir's artistic, enigmatic and ambiguous Australian mystery drama is a strange and haunting film but not exactly one known for a break-neck pace. Weir later recalled a potential distributor throwing his coffee cup at the screen after viewing the film, saying he'd "wasted two hours of his life" watching it.

It's unlikely that impatient audiences frustrated with this critical darling's languid pace will be particularly placated by the version re-cut by Weir for the film's 1998 reissue, but it does shave a whole seven minutes off that nearly two hour runtime.

Weir argued that the removed scenes, mostly interactions between young Englishman Michael and the schoolgirls who go missing, detracted from the narrative and that taking them out improved the flow of the movie.

The slightly shorter version may well flow better, but it was not well received by purists who loved to pore over every detail of the film's intricate construction. Essentially, the shorter director's cut did nothing to attract audiences who already thought Picnic At Hanging Rock too slow and its lack of resolution frustrating, but it did annoy the existing fanbase.

Regardless of the director's own preferences, then, the original Picnic is still the one most often seen.